TFF Joins Forces with Wikifactory to Enable Open Hardware Innovation

All teams participating in the 2019 TFF Challenge gain access to Wikifactory’s social platform for open-source product development

The Thought For Food (TFF) Foundation, the world’s next-generation innovation engine for food and agriculture, and Wikifactory, the social platform for collaborative product development, announce their partnership, which focuses on enabling knowledge and technical exchange for digitally-fabricated, data-driven and AI-powered hardware solutions in food and agriculture.

The Wikifactory platform is seamlessly integrated onto the TFF Digital Labs, a startup acceleration and collaboration platform built for and by the next generation of food and agtech innovators in all parts of the world, and which is freely available to all participants in the 2019 TFF Challenge.

Teams can collaborate with Wikifactory’s 8000-strong community that spans across 130 countries, and can access and contribute to over 800 open hardware projects, which range from robotics and drones to sensors, food-waste tech, recycling, equipment solutions and much more. They can also access free collaboration tools that allow them to host and view their projects online, including a powerful 3D viewer for over 30 CAD formats, a flexible documentation editor, and feedback and task systems to manage work processes across virtual teams. With these tools, it becomes possible to engage more hardware developers and product innovators around shared projects, and effectively involve feedback for rapid iteration.

Two example projects that TFF Challenge Teams can access and contribute to include:

Dronecoria, an open-source drone platform for aerial sowing of seed balls aiming to reforest and revive wilderness;
Smart Citizen Kit, an Open-Source Environmental Monitoring Platform consisting of Arduino-compatible hardware, data visualization web API, and mobile app.

With these and the other open hardware projects that Wikifactory offers, innovators have the potential to engage broad and diverse communities into the product development process, and can deploy their solutions in more places via a distributed network of 3D printers and maker spaces.

Through the use of low-cost sensors and small, automated systems that leverage widely-accessible electronics like Arduino and Raspberry Pi, cutting-edge food and ag-tech innovation becomes more accessible and relevant for small players, not just large-scale universities, corporations and farmers with access to massive budgets.

Openness and collaboration are core to the next-generation innovation approach that Thought For Food stands for, and through the years TFF has explored new types of business models that enable broad cooperation and the integration of many technical building blocks owned across many parties. By encouraging simplified structures for technology transfer and cross-licensing programs, the organization aims to reduce duplicative innovation efforts and ensure that beneficial innovations can be developed more quickly and efficiently.

Christina Rebel, Co-founder and Chief Communities Officer at Wikifactory, states, “We are excited to partner with Thought For Food to build a thriving ecosystem of open hardware for food innovation. We want to see food-tech innovators, farmers, engineers, and agripreneurs to apply the open mindset of a software designer to accelerate the solution development for challenges facing our food systems. We might not have all the answers as individuals, but by sharing openly with a global community we can arrive at solutions faster.”

Christine Gould, Founder and CEO of Thought For Food, agrees, “We have seen the massive innovation boost that open source has brought to the software industry, and we want to bring that spirit to the food and agriculture industry. We need more people creating innovations, participating in using it, and integrating solutions to create broader impact. Our world has reached a critical turning point where our old innovation systems are ripe for reinvention by mass collaboration. We need to reboot all the old models, approaches and structures, and this is one way we can help do this. By supporting the open hardware and open-source movement, Thought For Food and Wikifactory aim to increase the speed and impact of food system innovation towards sustainability and inclusivity.”

Anyone passionate to become a creator for food system change can sign up for free to the 2019 TFF Challenge. By signing up, all participants gain access to the TFF Digital Labs that is now integrated with Wikifactory’s hardware collaboration tools, as well as practical learning content, expert and peer-to-peer mentoring, virtual live sessions, and perks from TFF’s network of partners. Teams chosen as Finalists will have the chance to win enticing prizes from Thought For Food, Food Lab at Google Accelerator (FLAG), Beta.Space, and reNature Foundation and travel to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in March 2020, to pitch their ideas in front of an international jury and investors.

About Thought For Food
Thought For Food is the world’s entrepreneurial innovation engine for food and agriculture. We work with more than 15,000 next-generation leaders from over 160 countries, helping to generate and scale thousands of ideas through our comprehensive suite of next-generation innovation programs. These include the TFF Challenge, our annual collaborative prize competition; the TFF Digital Labs, our digital startup accelerator and collaboration platform; the TFF Academy, our in-person incubation program for world-class startups; and the TFF Summit, our flagship global event focused on bringing the voices of the next generation into solution development. Our work is powered by our global operating structure, including the TFF Core Team, 13 Regional Coordinators and 400 Ambassadors in more than 200 cities. Thought For Food is a 501c3 non-profit entity. Find out more about Thought For Food at https://thoughtforfood.org/ or on Linkedin.

About Wikifactory
Wikifactory is the social platform for collaborative product development that connects product developers and hardware innovators with the online collaboration tools and global community to accelerate their work. Wikifactory hosts the fastest growing community of 8,000 product developers from over 130 countries. Wikifactory’s mission is to enable a future where anyone with an idea for a product can build a team online, collaborate efficiently and start distributing their designs worldwide. Our all-in-one workspace for collaborative product development equips teams with a powerful version control repository to host their projects, a flexible documentation editor and an Issue tracker to manage feedback and tasks. Inspired by best practices of software development, build for product development from the ground up. Wikifactory launched in 2018 and has raised $1.5 m in Seed capital.